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Do we have a way to freeze Bruce Willis until it is known for sure if the asteroids might hit us or not?

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

Or just possibly along with an ~10% false negative rate the algorithm might also have a 0.5% false positive rate and none of those rocks will come anywhere near the Earth within the several century window that we can make meaningful predictions. (On longer time-scales the combination of only being able to approximate solving the n-body problem and the combination of spin and light pressure[^] effectively randomize the positions of smaller asteroids.)

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

This post attempts to describe a mindset I’ve come to realize I bring to essentially all of my work with software. I attempt to articulate this mindset, some of its implications and strengths, and some of the ways in which it’s lead me astray.

Computers are actually easy to understand, computers just follow what they get feed... what I fail to understand is why the heck someone would do things in the way they are usually done.

Quoting the article of [Don't use the word "did"...] below:

Quote:

At risk of running counter to Sinclair’s claim, in this case – as Lovelace herself would’ve hopefully agreed – it is people who are stupid, not computers. The proof for that can be found in the ...

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

What he's essentially saying is that no-one but him should be trusted, no matter how well qualified and experienced they are in their specialist fields.

In fact, he seems to be against any kind of specialisation. Does he plumb and wire his own houses, and build his own fridges and TVs out of components and materials he has himself manufactured/mined/processed/etc?

Understanding the next layer down isn't akin to building it from scratch. Consider if a circuit breaker in your house wouldn't stay on - you'd systematically unplug stuff until you had power back, you probably know enough to unplug appliances that typically draw a lot of power first as well. There's a big difference between learning enough to do that, and wiring your house from scratch.

Learning a little bit about the stuff you don't need to know about is great, otherwise how would you be able to judge between whether or not something like drain cleaner, or a frontend JavaScript framework was an unnecessary and unhelpful?

For sure, and it's an excellent article... asking someone to write code at an interview will get you my "how much money do you have?" look.
And I'm far too old to play games with a 28 year old something project manager prick who thinks he knows it all... yeah, had one of those interviews. Even helped their engineering team solve a bug they'd been fighting for a week... but these people were smoking the OO weed and off into inheritance diagrams instead of working code.

Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...

The experience of the writer just elephanting pisses me off. I can tell you for a fact that if I had guys slinging algorithms around like asked for in the interview, I'd be very concerned. Why?

I happen to be a grunt EE who writes embedded s/w and HMIs. My products NEVER die. Fancy code gives me the squirts. Stick with the basics, don't come up with fancy embedded classes within .h files. You might die (I might be a suspect) before I ever retire.

I am so tired of fancy code that is unsupportable.

Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...

In 2018, the owner of Two-Bit History, a site dedicated to computer history, wrote a successful article about mathematician Ada Lovelace, who some credit as being the first computer programmer. Sadly, if you search Google for that article today you won't find it. Some idiotic anti-piracy company had it deleted because it dared to use the word 'did'.

“Got a cheery confirmation email from Google saying, ‘Thanks for contacting us!’ and that it might be a while until the issue is resolved. I assume that’s because this is the point where finally a decision has to be made by a human being. It is annoying indeed.”

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.